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Carol Platt Liebau - Columnist
Carol
Platt Liebau is editorial director and a senior member of tOR and CRO editorial
boards. She is an attorney, political analyst and commentator
based in San Marino, CA, and has appeared on the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, Orange County News Channel, Cox Cable
and a variety of radio programs throughout the United States.
A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School,
Carol Platt Liebau also served as the first female managing
editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her web log can be found
at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com
[go to Liebau index]
 From “Crossing
the Bar” to Crossing a Line
The Netherlands’ Groningen Protocols Are a Grisly
Human Nightmare
[Carol
Platt Liebau] 12/6/04
One of the
most beautiful poems ever written about death, Crossing
the Bar, was penned by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1889, three
years before his own demise.
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness or farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
As the poem
makes plain, there can be something noble and even beautiful
about
a death that comes in God’s own time, after
a life well lived. But there is nothing peaceful or holy about
death these days for some in The Netherlands. Only recently has
the world learned of the Groningen Protocols – a policy
allowing children up to age 12 to be euthanized if an “independent” committee
of doctors determines that a child’s condition is terminal
and the situation otherwise warrants it. Note this horrifying
fact: The wishes of the child’s parents would be considered,
but are not determinative, reported by The Grand Forks
Herald.
What does
this mean? Well, in the Netherlands, theoretically at least,
sick children
can be murdered against their own wishes
and those of their parents. Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice,
this news is shocking; it is the first time that any Western
society has condoned the killing of infants after they have been
born. Indeed, it is a profoundly frightening development when
the power of death over innocent life is handed to “independent
boards” or to government.
From time
immemorial, in the very small proportion of cases where little
ones suffer
from terrible, incurable pain in the
final stages of a terminal disease, doctors and parents have
agonized together, and then struggled to determine the most compassionate
and humane course. But here, a precedent is being formulated
whereby life-and-death decisions are delegated to an impersonal
board. And once this concept is condoned in any guise, it becomes
that much easier for it to be extended to more and more and more
people – the sickly, the burdensome, the weak. Suddenly,
we’re back in the world of Nazi Germany – where only
the strong, the robust and the fit, as determined by the government
or other authorities, are deemed worthy to live.
It would
be naïve to assume that cost plays no part in
any of this. The Netherlands – like most of Europe and
Canada – is a bastion of socialized medicine. It’s
not hard to imagine that these “independent boards” could
come under significant pressure to find that a particular patient’s
hope of recovery and quality of life is, to put it delicately,
inversely proportional to the cost of his or her care. And so,
here in America, when the Democrats or anyone else extol the
virtues of a “European” or “Canadian” (read:
socialist) health care system, remember: If everyone must pay
for your care, it seems only reasonable that everyone gets a
say in whether you’re treated (or not).
It’s been reported that in the Netherlands, when they
check into hospitals, elderly people have begun to carry with
them written appeals that they not be euthanized. A Dutch court
recently declined to punish a doctor who had injected an elderly
woman with fatal drugs – even though she had specifically
stated that she did not want to die. The court called the incident “an
error in judgment.”
The “brave new world” laid bare by the Groningen
Protocols hardly bears contemplation. For when any innocent life – even
that of the old, the sick, the weak and the mad – is held
worthless, all innocent life is in jeopardy. With the Groningen
Protocols, the Netherlands has taken a grisly step – reminding
us all that, these days, death for the Dutch has become ever
more about crossing the line, rather than Crossing the Bar. tOR
Columnist
Carol Platt Liebau is a political analyst, commentator and CaliforniaRepublic.org editorial
director based in San Marino, CA. Ms. Liebau also served
as the first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Her web log can be found at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com
copyright
2004
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